ABSTRACT
The mythical world of primordial tradition The narratives about the primordial common memories and beliefs of the Korean people who inhabited the Korean Peninsula and a sizeable section of southern Manchuria are represented in the primordial legends of ancient kings such as Tongmyŏng 東明聖王 (Ko Chumong 高朱蒙, r. 37-19 bce) of the kingdom of Koguryŏ 高句麗 (37 bce-668 ce) as well as the legend of Pak Hyŏkkŏse 朴赫居 世 (r. 57 bce-4 ce) of the kingdom of Silla 新羅 (57 bce-935 ce). These myths tell us how humans experienced their selfhood standing over against the threats of the brevity and the uncertainty of human life and how they came to feel a tremendous need for meaning, permanence, and strength in a transitory, lonely, and perilous world. Gripped by an overwhelming sense of anxiety, these ancestors searched for a frame of reference to understand the world and ways to cope with their finite existential realities. Through these myths we can have a glimpse of how in a variety of ways communal life emerged from the experience of life in the pack organized and led by the leadership of a ruler. The primordial memories range from mythic explanations of the births of rulers and the origins of clans and tribal kingdoms to accounts of such human matters as marriage, family, childbirth, and death. Their prime motifs – birth, observance of taboos, metamorphosis, success, and failure – provide the rationale for the particular worldviews and values of Korean society. Participation in the cosmic order through prescribed rituals as defined by these myths, in turn, provided avenues for people to act out their wishes, fears, and frustrations. These collective social memories based on common experiences and their periodic ritualistic reenactments served as the foundations of social cohesion of the earliest community. When faced with the tremendous powers present in the world of nature that stood against them, these primordial ancestors understood the powers of nature in personalized way, assuming that every energizing force experienced in life was animated by a spirit. They understood that through cajolery, flattering, and pleasing the animating spirits they could influence the supernatural powers to respond to their need and help them to survive. Eventually they postulated a male deity who ruled the sky and related to the earth. And they came to believe that it is possible for this ruler of heaven or heavenly spirit (Hanŭllim 하늘님 or
Hanŭnim 하느님) to come to the people while they simultaneously get nearer to Heaven, reaching toward it through bodily acting, as in prayer, offering, and dancing out their ardent wish (much’ŏn 舞天), to attain specific goals – rain, harvest, progeny, and health. Thus, it was vulnerable humans who constructed the supernatural powers that they experienced as “other”; it was not a divine being who revealed the self.1 The experience of Heaven was neither a solitary event nor mere spectatorship, but rather one in which the whole body participated as well as an occasion for the entire community to gather periodically for communal partaking in the sacred objects for supplication and thanksgiving. For sheer survival in primitive times it was necessary for frightened and vulnerable people to live in family groups and later in larger and more complex tribal bands, hunting, foraging for food, and caring for each other. Breaking from the monotonous and tiring everyday routines of hunting, fishing, and gathering herbs the whole community drew together for days on end to participate in a religious ceremony. During the ritual everyone indulged night and day in eating, drinking, singing, chanting, and dancing together, carried away by hŭng 興 or sinpparam 신바람/신빠람 (a collective, ecstatic outpouring of intense emotion). They believed that drumming a welcome rhythm for dancing to Heaven would be a sacred way to enter the trance state to meet the spirits in another world, communicating with them and invoking them so as to attain desired goals in the real world. The religious rituals of singing, rhythmic beating of drum, and dancing (yŏnggo 迎鼓) also made up a spiritual medium par excellence to strengthen the moral fabric and social solidarity, enabling people to be one with their fellow members of the community in empathetic and ecstatic harmony and companionship. The communal celebration in singing, eating, drinking, and dancing together, as described above, may be common to primordial communities throughout the world. But these primal expressions have perennially been the way Koreans release their essential psychic energy, distinguishing them as a very emotive, artistic, and lyrical people who exuberantly manifest their celebrated artistic sensibilities in the forms of music, films, and dance the world over. Behind the so-called latest Korean artistic currents (Hallyu 韓流) and pop culture crazes, such as Korean TV dramas, films, and dances, and their well-known penchant for singing, dancing, and drinking whenever they get together (as manifested in ubiquitous noraebang singing rooms, nightclubs, and drinking bars), I presume, are the persistent remnants of the primordial religious habits, temperament, or disposition of the ancient Koreans. As Robert N. Bellah commented about Durkheim’s analysis of “the social implications of primitive religion,” the French sociologist’s fundamental insight that “the ritual life does reinforce the solidarity of the society,” uniting people into a single community, “still seems to be largely acceptable.”2 At the climax of the rituals the members of the community also experienced themselves filled with amazing energy greatly beyond their ordinary capacity, thus finding themselves capable of toiling in the fields with reinvigorated strength and surviving in the most adverse circumstances with confidence. Again, this is remi-
niscent of Durkheim’s narrative and theorization of the sacred festive gathering, or a corroboree, among the Australian Aborigines during the earlier stage of human evolution.3 The various periodic communal festivals in which they partook ranged from Ch’ŏn’gun 天君 (literally, Heavenly Prince, or shaman-king, who leads an assembly for the cult of Heaven in Mahan 馬韓) to such cults of Heaven as Much’ŏn (literally, “dancing to heaven,” which was a harvest festival in the tenth lunar month in Ye 濊). Besides these, similar ritual activities included Sodo 蘇 塗 (religious ceremonies to serve gods in a sanctuary where fugitives were free from arrest in the Samhan 三韓); Yŏnggo (or festivals to invoke heavenly spirits by beating the drum in Puyŏ 夫餘); and Tongmaeng-je 東盟祭 (assembly of people for the cult of Heaven in Koguryŏ, which was celebrated in the tenth month). According to Yi Nŭng-hwa 李能和 (1868-1945), a leading pioneer scholar of Korean religious history, these rituals of Neolithic people were all remnants of the Korean foundation myth of Tan’gun 檀君 to be described below.4 Early Koreans essentially knew only a single whole community inhabiting in an all-inclusive, living cosmic order forming a close triad with Heaven and earth. Theirs was a single-dimensional, ritual community that was characterized by the absence of distinction between human and celestial powers or between secular and spiritual communion.5 This was really the oldest form of the native religion of a nation of gatherers and farmers living off relatively fruitful land, passable rivers, and low mountains (as contrasted to a society of nomadic herders of cattle and hunters or a maritime society fit for fishing, trade, and expedition on the high seas). An outstanding feature of this stable religion of farmers and gatherers was a unitary and holistic worldview that affirmed a basic continuum between the natural, human, and godly worlds. Another noticeable feature of the religion was its intense attachment to specific stable localities and kinship. Thus the distinctions between good and evil, body and spirit, and physical and spiritual worlds were absent in the holistic world where life was continuous and fully integrated. Since, in the thoroughly this-worldly view, the phenomenal world itself was absolutely all that there was, there was no transcendent world that existed beyond the phenomenal world. If anything, even Heaven or celestial powers existed for humans, not the other way around.6 This particular form of early Korean religion has generally been called Musok 巫俗 (an emic, native term meaning “shamanic customs,” which otherwise came to be known as “shamanism” in the generic, etic classification of such a religion). One could object to or question the widely used term, Musok, out of self-conscious defense of the uniqueness of Korean tradition of “Mu 巫,” distinguishing it from the term, Musok, which allegedly smacks of adulteration because of its diffuseness with ordinary customs and social life. On the other hand, however, such an objection could be counter-argued that, after all, Mu has been widely diffused in the Korean way of life and that it has been devoid of common features of historic religions such as institutional apparatus, creeds, and so on.7
